Someone Else's Love Story (7 page)

“You’re squooshing me,” Natty said, both hands moving to hold his cap on.

I said, “Shhhh,” half a heartbeat behind.

I eased my bottom an inch away, but stayed leaned. Thor did the same thing, and I was so glad to be seated near him. So glad that Natty was even nearer. Close to him felt like the safest place in the room.

I heard a soft plopping noise on my other side. The clerk was sitting with her knees up in a tent, hunched forward over them, her broken front teeth showing through her open mouth. Her head was tilted down in profile to me, and the plops were tears falling out of her and down onto her jeans, making wet spots. I wasn’t crying, I realized, and felt strangely proud. It would scare Natty more if I cried, so I wasn’t doing it, and that was all. On the other end was the old couple, first the woman, and then the man tucked into the corner. On the short wall next to him was the only door in.

Stevie—God, what a stupid name for a grown man with a pistol—grabbed one of the twin rolling office chairs and pulled it under the windows, beside a file cabinet. The top of his baseball cap didn’t even clear the windows when he was standing, but he sat anyway. His T-shirt was dirty and it said
SHAZAM!
across the front in peeling letters. The chair was high for him, so only his toes touched the floor. He swiveled it back and forth, not even noticing he was doing it, the same way Natty might.

The afternoon sun coming through the window slits made us all squint. He swayed in the chair, looking at us with the sun in our eyes, and said, “Sorry about that. I need to be under these here windows in case of they send snipers.”

I heard a person say, “That’s okay!” all cheery, and it was me.

Stevie stared at me then like I was being a bad hostage instead of him sucking at robbing. But I hadn’t been able to help it, just like I couldn’t help smiling at him, an encouraging, big-ass smile that showed all my teeth.

The voice in the back of my mind said,
Are you trying to make
friends
with this shithead?
And I was. I had a whole push of words rising up in my throat that I had to work to swallow:
Hey, Stevie! I’m a Pisces who loves sweet pickles and early David Bowie songs, and did you know my son is a certified genius and a miracle? He’ll probably cure cancer one day, Stevie. Do you want to shoot the boy who’ll stamp out cancer?

Because Stevie had told us his name and apologized for the sun glare, like we were people, I wanted to be a whole, real person to Stevie, so he wouldn’t hurt my son. I wanted it so bad I was shaking.

I made myself pull a bunch of air in through my nose. The room smelled like Vicks VapoRub and tuna salad sandwiches. Old-people smells. I pushed the air out and kept right on smiling, trying to make a face that told Stevie that I might not know him well, but I already liked him an ungodly amount. He looked away.

I peeked at Thor. He looked a ready kind of still. Was he going to make a move? I wanted him to, but what if it went wrong? What if Stevie got angry and started shooting, and Natty— I couldn’t think past that.

I let my gaze slide sideways to the desk beside Thor, seeking something that might help us. It looked like something from a dorm room, cheap and modern. No drawers. On top was an old square monitor that had to weigh a thousand pounds and a bunch of other useless crap in a jumble: keys, envelopes, pens, a ceramic dish full of paper clips. The computer tower was on the floor underneath, and the other side of the desk had some open shelving. The bottom shelf had the printer, and above that was a stack of white paper held down by a big glass globe paperweight. It was shaped like a squashed softball, with a huge, perfect orange Gerber daisy trapped in the glass.

No drawers. That seemed important. I badly wanted the desk to have at least one drawer.

Then I stopped looking because Stevie got out of his chair and walked to the door.

He locked it. He literally turned the flip lock on the doorknob, like he was in here going to the bathroom. Like a flip lock could stop cops or bullets.

I looked to Thor, but he wasn’t looking back. He was watching Stevie, too, and he gave a faint, incredulous headshake. He knew, and I knew, too. Stevie was a novice or incompetent or maybe just plain stupid. He was going to eff this whole thing up.

Thinking that was like being gut-punched. I felt my waist jackknife and fold me forward in a twitch because I saw what Stevie effing it all up might look like. It looked like me dead, like Natty traumatized and motherless.

That wasn’t even the worst that could happen, but the thing that was worse than my own death could not be allowed. It could not even be considered. I would curl up all the way around my son, and I would eat up every bullet with my body, before I let the worst thing be. Natty would walk out of here. That was nonnegotiable.

“Now what?” Stevie said, loud and not calm at all.

He banged his gun-free hand into his forehead, like he was trying to beat his brain into thinking. I wanted to kill him for asking us. For not knowing what to do, and quietly and powerfully doing it until he was away with his bag of cash and smokes and we were all out safe. My heart flailed and pulsed against my ribs in what felt like a million beats a minute. I couldn’t stop any of this. Stevie needed to step up and be a damn pro. But he was going to eff it up.

Stevie had a gun, so Stevie, who was otherwise as viable as dog crap, owned us. If I died here, Natty would be an orphan. Would he go looking for his father? But what could he find, when there was no such thing? When Natty happened, he was born wholly mine and perfect. This is what I whispered into the pink coil of his newborn ear:
My body made you up, because the world is so much better with you in it.

I didn’t say that to anyone else, not even my parents. They would have questioned it, tried to make me test it. Me, I knew what I knew.

But why hadn’t I already invented that tragic hero-soldier father, fallen in Afghanistan, in case I walked under a bus one day? I’d thought I had time. I’d assumed I had a whole long lifetime to invent Natty a nice, dead father, perfectly loving and permanently absent.

If Natty went looking, there were other stories he could find. He might dig up that distant, deep blue night, the misty not-quite-memory story that Walcott told my parents. It was a fairy tale in Grimm’s tradition, and I’d never told it to anyone. I hadn’t even told it to myself, because I knew that night had nothing to do with Natty. Walcott and my parents saw it differently, though.

I didn’t know squat about guns, but right then I wanted Stevie’s anyway. The gun in my hands and not his would change everything. I would own
him
, and suddenly it was hard to put my eyes on anything else. I had to physically turn my head to stop staring at it. That meant I was looking at the drawerless desk again.

I knew then why I wanted it to have drawers. Because it was close to me, and people hid things in desk drawers. Things like weapons. How did I know, really, for sure, that Stevie had the only gun in the room?

The Circle K near Mimmy’s house, I knew, was chock-full of weaponry. It was owned by Mrs. Quincy and it was a craphole, a lot like this one. All the candy was dusty. One or another of Mrs. Quincy’s hairy, tattooed sons manned the counter. Her boys, all four of them, could each throw a Coke bottle up high, high into the sky and shoot it into a rain of glass on the way down. Walcott called it Redneck Skeet, and back when we were kids we used to bike up and get dip cones at the DQ, then walk over to the meadows behind that Circle K to watch them do it. They had guns tucked all over that store.

Like as not, there was a gun here, too.

The old people on the end of the row were the owners, I thought. This office was full of old-people smells, and they had come out of the door that led back here. I didn’t think these two spent their weekends shooting at Coke bottles; she had on resort wear, and her bag exactly, exactly matched her shoes. He was wearing a thin summer cardigan. But this was Georgia, and not city Georgia, either. Not for quite a few miles yet. These old folks were country people, and they sure as hell looked like Republicans. They had to have at least a pistol hidden here. Maybe a shotgun, too.

Stevie scratched his head, pushing his fingers up under the cap to get at his scalp, muttering to himself. I risked a slight lean toward the clerk and whispered, “Gun?”

She turned her face to me, her eyes black-ringed with cried-away mascara. She shook her head, a rapid back-and-forth so subtle it was barely more than a tremble. But it wasn’t a no. It was an animal move, uncomprehending.

I looked all around the room, and then mouthed, “Gun?” again. Her eyebrows knit, still puzzled. Finally, I made a gun out of my fingers, showing it to her in the shelter of my legs. “Where is it?”

Her eyes went wide, and this time the tremble back and forth was a definite no. At the same time, her gaze darted away from me to a two-drawer metal file cabinet by the door. The cowardly little object was lying. The file cabinet had a weapon in it, I was sure.

Stevie had turned toward me. “Are you talking to her? What are you saying to her?”

Stevie took a step in my direction.

As the gun turned our way and Stevie stepped close with such intent, I could feel Thor coiling. The muscles in his big body tensed, readying for fast movement, but he wasn’t really Thor. He was just some big blond guy, sitting close to Natty. I couldn’t let gunfire happen this close to my son.

I started talking, my voice all high and shaky. “Nothing, just . . . nothing, just . . .”

“Just what? Just what?” Stevie said, and the gun seemed to grow and swell in his hand as he approached. With every step he took, the blond guy wound himself tighter, and that huge and huger gun came closer to my kid.

I said, desperate, “I was checking on her. She seems real scared.”

Stevie drew up short, and the gun tilted a little sideways. Off Natty. Now it was pointing at Thor himself, and I felt Thor’s tension ease a notch. It made me love him more, that he would rather have its eye on him than Natty.

Stevie blinked. “Well, that’s nice then.” After a second he added, “She don’t need to be scared.”

Now that he had stepped in close, I saw how red and quivery the skin around his nostrils looked. His pupils were huge, though the room was bright. Dear God, but Stevie was jacked up on something. He started to back away, his twitchy gaze pinging to the door.

“We’re all scared,” I said. He paused like this was a new idea to him, and I kept talking, because now I had something human and not crazy to say. “My son here, Natty, he is only three. Natty is so scared. He shouldn’t be in here.”

Now Stevie looked at Natty, and I could feel Natty shrink into me. “You scared?” Stevie asked.

I felt more than saw Natty’s head dip in a nod.

“Well, don’t be. I like little kids. I’m a daddy myself. I ain’t gonna shoot no little kids, okay?” Then he walked backward, glancing all around the room so it looked like his eyes were rolling. “Oh Christ, what next?”

Stevie, who would be our hostage taker today, was floundering. The gun wobbled in his hand.

“I gotta get out of here,” he said. “Should I run? Maybe I should run.”

I stared at him, too frozen with hope to answer. The clerk beside me made a honking noise, swallowing her tears, and his gaze went to her.

She said, “Yes. Run. You should run now.” Her voice was low and trembly, but she sounded so sure. I could have kissed her.

He made a move for the flip-locked door, and my heart fluttered and flapped, wild with hope. But then Stevie stopped and cocked his head like a dog. It was a full three seconds before I understood.

Sirens. I could hear them in the distance, wailing their way closer every second. We all froze then, listening to the cops coming. Lots of them. An ambulance for the downed Statie, too, I bet. Walcott was doing what he could for us, but why couldn’t the cops have been two minutes later?

Stevie moved first, stamping his feet in a blurring frenzy of a rage dance, then hopping up and down like a redneck Rumpelstiltskin. He kicked backward, like a vicious mule, the sole of his boot banging at the wall behind him five or six times. It made flat slaps of ugly sound against the brick. He said a long chain of words, most ones that Natty had never heard before.

I put my head down, made myself smaller, squeezing Natty close into my side. I had to make everything be different. I needed a gun. Stevie had one, and that meant Natty could be hurt, could be worse than hurt. I could not allow it.

I had this crazy trapped-on-the-playground-seesaw feeling then, like I was jacked up in the air with my legs hanging down, clutching Natty close, and Stevie-Our-Robber-Today was a mean kid on the other end, having a temper tantrum. He held us helpless in the air, and he was flailing around, not in control. He could drop us down hard, any second. I hated it. I hated it.

He could kill me, and it was worse than not leaving a nice story behind for my son. I could die here, and I had never told myself the truth.

I’d closed my eyes to it four years ago, when Natty stopped my period. When he made me puke up all my breakfasts and switched my sweet-set mouth to loving onions and hot peppers. I had Walcott’s momses take me to a doctor, and I let the doctor tell them what I already knew: I was a virgin. I was pregnant.